Sierra Leone votes this Saturday to elect its new president, with outgoing head of state Julius Maada Bio seeking a second term amid economic difficulties in the African country.
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Some 3.4 million people were summoned to the polls to choose among 13 candidates. The vote opened with some delays, for example at Wilberforce Barracks in the capital Freetown, AFP journalists found.
This presidential is the 2018 rematch between Bio, a 59-year-old retired ex-military leader of the Sierra Leone People’s Party, and his rival technocrat Samura Kamara, 72-year-old head of the All People’s Congress. On that occasion, Bio had prevailed in the second round with 51.8% of the votes.
Since then, Bio has governed one of the poorest countries in the world, hard hit by covid-19 and then the war in Ukraine. The former British colony was already struggling to recover from a bloody civil war (1991-2002) and the Ebola epidemic (2014-2016). Inflation and anti-government exasperation led to incidents in August 2022 that killed 27 civilians and six police officers.
A candidate needs 55% of the valid votes to be elected in the first round. Sierra Leone elects its Parliament and local councils at the same time. A third of the candidates are women, under a new law. Bio was a member of a group of officers who seized power by force in 1992 and led another coup in 1996 after which he organized free elections before leaving for the United States.
His main adversary, Kamara, was Minister of Finance and then Minister of Foreign Affairs before Bio came to power in 2018 through democratic means.
